ALBANY, N.Y. March 11, 2014 - A report by the Governor's Common Core panel borrows from some worthy solutions offered by others but defies logic by suggesting that unreliable, invalid and unfair student test scores can be used in teacher evaluations, New York State United Teachers said today.
"If the Common Core panel says the implementation has been so badly flawed and mismanaged that test results must not be used to make decisions about schools or students, how can they be used to make decisions about teachers and administrators?" asked NYSUT President Richard C. Iannuzzi. "If the state is even going to entertain using test scores as a small measure of teacher performance - and, frankly, to this point no good model has been found - it certainly cannot use tests that have been dismissed as invalid for measuring student progress. If the results are so unfair, so discredited and so unreliable that they can't count for students or schools, they also can't count for educators."
NYSUT welcomed the report's recommendation that New York abandon the controversial inBloom project and seek alternatives, and conceptually backed other proposals to eliminate unnecessary testing and increase professional development and parent engagement. There were ideas previously embraced by the Regents, contained in the Assembly's legislation or supported by the Senate Education Committee.
"The panel's line of reasoning is puzzling to say the least," said NYSUT Executive Vice President Andrew Pallotta. "If ‘insufficient support' for teachers, principals and the public and ‘uneven and poorly executed implementation' of the Common Core corrupted test scores so fully they can't be used credibly or fairly for students, how can they be used to fairly or credibly evaluate educators?"
NYSUT continues to push strenuously for a moratorium on the use of standardized test results for high-stakes decisions for students and teachers while the State Education Department and Regents make the many, necessary course corrections to fix their failed implementation plan.
New York State United Teachers is a statewide union with more than 600,000 members in education, human services and health care. NYSUT is affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association and the AFL-CIO.
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